Posts Tagged ‘Sandipan Deb’

Open, the much-awaited news and features magazine from the corporate house, RPG Enterprises, has launched with an opinion poll in Pakistan (which says 90% will join the army if there is an Indo-Pak war) as the cover story.

Designed by Itu Chaudhuri Design, the 74-page magazine is edited by Sandipan Deb, and hopes to give long-form journalism some much-needed bandwidth.

Deb’s introductory letter to readers reads:

“We hope you will find [Open] inviting, liberal, without biases, inclusive and eager to engage….

“We hope to be a weekly offering on your life and times. We hope to inform, engage, stimulate and entertain in an intelligent fashion. But isn’t this what almost all magazines set out to do? Yes, there may be nothing new in what we want to do, but we think we will be distinctive in how we do so, in these strange and complex times we live in….

“We won’t repeat the news you have already watched on TV, read in the papers and on the net. We don’t want to be a purely India-centric magazine. We will be quirky. We will often be opinionated. We will not shirk from admitting mistakes. And we will not be a magazine that mostly men find interesting. Ever.”

Indian newspapers, television, magazines all seem to have unanimously decided that the attention span of the time-strapped reader and viewer has shrunk so much that stories should end before they begin.

So, is there place for long-form journalism, where every reporter and writer is potentially a short story writer, which Robert Benchley described magnificently in a 1925 New Yorker essay: “Up the dark stairs in a shabby house plodded a bent, weary figure”?

Yes, says Sandipan Deb, the editorial head of the newly launched magazine division of the Rs 14,000 crore RPG group which aims to bring out six magazines by 2010. The first one is due out in October this year, and Deb gives Mint a snapshot of what the flagship is going to look like:

“It’ll be a cross between the Time magazine and The New Yorker. The brief is to bring out a weekly free-thinking magazine. Our target audience is the discerning reader, who is well travelled and well-read, who enjoys reading the best global publications, and has the time and taste for good reading.”